Granted independence by Britain in 1970, the Shiite-majority island kingdom of Bahrain has long been the object of Iranian designs. Tehran, which has been supporting insurrectionist groups there for years, has recently escalated its rhetoric. Michael Rubin writes:

[T]he Iranian government appears determined to test President Trump’s resolve by ramping up pressure on Bahrain. Earlier this month, Hojjat al-Islam Mojtaba Zonour, [a high-ranking Iranian official], explicitly threatened to level the U.S. base in Bahrain with ballistic missiles. . . .

Every Friday for 38 years, either the supreme leader or a cleric appointed by him has led Friday prayers in central Tehran and delivered a sermon that highlights the official priorities and positions of the Islamic Republic. This past Friday, the appointed prayer leader . . . told the Bahraini government, “Failure awaits you; your destruction is near.”

Such rhetoric should not be dismissed as empty. After all, the Islamic Republic is on the warpath. Its carefully cultivated proxies are the dominant power in Lebanon, prop up the Syrian government, . . . and have staged a coup d’état in Yemen. The possibility that Iranian officials might target not only the U.S. presence in Bahrain but the entire country is not unthinkable. . . .

If President Trump, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wish to show allies that America will once again stand by them, and if Trump is serious about standing up to terrorism and aggression, it is time to support Bahrain forcefully and openly. Simply put, Tehran will interpret silence as weakness, and weakness as an invitation to further aggression.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.